Natural Price Points and Unlimited Plans

The Consumer Electronics industry has understood natural price points for a long time – those psychological barriers consumers use to determine ‘fair value’. Essentially, people, regardless of income level, have a common understanding of how much they are willing to pay for a given product or good. Marketing executives use those price points to design product and services that will be sold at that price; otherwise the number of units sold drops significantly. Natural price points are the perfect intersection of consumer psychology and business’s economic desire for growth. A marketer’s daily challenge is how to grow revenue when people are already paying the upper price point. The consumer is tapped out and the wallet is closed, what do you do next?

Carriers today are faced with this very problem of growing revenue with consumers whose wallets are tapped out. People’s expectations have settled in on a natural price point of unlimited data costing about USD$40 a person* in the U.S.. While some carriers (based network capacity, demand, spectrum and other factors) are offering that price point, Verizon and AT&T with much larger and more extensive networks to maintain, price flexibility is not in the cards. They charge nearly USD$80 for unlimited for a single line (i.e. subscriber with one phone line on their bill). To hit that magic Natural price point for unlimited data, they resort to a math trick and advertise “$40 Unlimited Data (4 lines required)”. However, consumers are smart enough to know that if they don’t need 4 lines, this is not a plan for them.

What happens if you are one of the 10’s of millions of people that only need a single phone line, want the quality and reach of AT&T or Verizon, but are only willing to pay for a metered plan? How do you surf with comfort you will not run out of data? Natural price points are a powerful barrier and people will irrationally stick by them. That is where Syntonic comes into play. By creating opportunity to sell micro ‘content- plans’ where data is included with app or service price, sponsored plans where a third party pays, or other marginal data usage as add-on upsells, Carriers can continue to grow revenue. Syntonic is a proud partner that is enabling carriers to grow their business.